Page 31 of Fearless
She had to remember this, because it wasn’t real and it wouldn’t last. And she was terrified she might actually be pregnant.
She had nothing. She hated herself. Who would ever want a woman who came with baggage like this? Nobody, except more people like Ethen. Maybe she didn’t deserve any better.
His hand roving up and down her back, Noah pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I…” he said
Kitty closed her eyes. “I’m a good girl,” she echoed, dutifully but dead inside. She would have thought she was all cried out, but the tears started all over again.
Patience personified, he rocked her as he asked, “What else?”
“I’m safe.”
“And?”
“I’m loved.” Her breath hitched so badly, she could barely understand the words she was saying. “I-I don’t have to be afraid of anything.”
“Do you believe it?” Noah asked when she was done.
Tempted as she was to lie, Kitty shook her head.
His hand never once stopped its comforting caress. “That’s all right, love. We’ve got time. One day, we’ll get there. I promise.”
When he turned his head to kiss her on the forehead, if she closed her eyes, she could almost believe he meant all the unspoken things that kisses like that ought to mean when a man held a woman in his arms.
Chapter 11
Kitty was physically, mentally, and quite possibly spiritually exhausted, and so Noah prescribed a nap as a part of his aftercare and tucked her into bed. He left a cup of tea and cookies on her nightstand, told her she didn’t have to sleep, but she did have to lie there with her eyes closed for at least twenty minutes. Then he packed himself a lunch, made up a thermos of coffee, loaded his croc traps into the back of his pickup, hooked up his boat, and headed to work.
The call he’d received was for a nuisance animal with a habit for basking in the middle of daycare playgrounds. His first stop was at the school, where he walked the fence line, locating two places where the animal might be getting in. Pliers, rebar, some extra twists of wire and quick-mix cement fixed that problem. Unloading his boat into the sluice that ran behind the daycare was his second step. Within half an hour, he had found several slides and flattened vegetation near the water’s edge. Setting his traps, he went back to his truck to break out the coffee and wait. While he waited, he occupied himself thinking.
It had felt good holding Kitty on his lap, rocking and comforting away her tears. Had he fixed anything for her? No, he wasn’t that arrogant or naïve enough to think so. But holding her had felt… unexpectedly fulfilling. Kissing her had been rousing as hell, and it had only been sheer will that had restricted those kisses to nothing more intimate than her forehead. He needed to stop calling her love. Generic as that pet name was and, granted, he had used it on dozens if not hundreds of women from the elderly to the lovely, all the way down to sweet little infants, the word was taking on connotations it had never held before. Not with anyone. He didn’t know why he was surprised. Wounded things had always roused his protective side, and he’d never met anyone more wounded than Kitty.
Still, he shifted behind the steering wheel, firmly ordering his lower half to knock it the hell off. There were more reasons than he had the fingers to count them for why he should make it a point to never again put himself through the sexual hell of doing to Kitty what he had done today. It might be the coffee he was drinking, but it was her smell he was savoring in his nose and on his tongue. That thin barrier of underwear might have prevented him from putting his mouth directly on her, but it had been saturated with her arousal. God, the taste of her. The heady aroma. The mewling need that had pricked at his iron-will with every muffled cry she had tried to stifle as he’d licked and nipped at her with his lips and teeth.
The sun went down slowly, but only half as slowly as he relived going down on Kitty. Not that finger fucking her hadn’t been just as fine. Later tonight, he’d probably fall asleep rock hard because he couldn’t shake the memory of it—the tightness of her ass locking down on his thrusting fingers, the pulse of her heartbeat through the slickness of her walls. Her grunts and moans and the arching of her hips as she pushed back on the anal plug he’d used on her so fucking jealously. That should have been him. Under any other circumstance, it would have been.
He had to stop thinking about it. It was done, he’d given her what she’d needed and he’d kept his damn pants zipped. That was Herculean, that’s what that was. He ought to be proud of himself. Someday maybe he would be… if and when the erection ever went away.
“Get your mind off it, mate,” Noah told his lap. “This isn’t helping.”
Plus, he had work to do. And that right there was dangerous enough, even without distractions.
The sun had only been down an hour when he got out to check the traps. He knew better than that, too. Under any other circumstance, he’d have put the seat back in his truck, lowered his hat over his eyes and gone to sleep until about midnight or so. Or hell, even gone home, depending on how local the job was. But waiting in his truck when he had someone like Kitty waiting for him at home just did not seem like any way for a bloke to spend the night.
Fate must have had a thing for hard-up men in sticky non-relationships, because against all odds, he found a salty in the second trap he’d set. It was only a little fellow, not even two-meters in length. Since the problem with the fence was fixed, he tagged it, re-baited his traps and went home. First thing in the morning, he’d return to check for something bigger and, if he had to, deal with the rest of it then.
Noah found the house dark when he got home. The only light on, he noticed, was Kitty’s lamp in her bedroom. Not because she’d gone to bed, he realized, but because she hadn’t got out of it after he’d left. He sat behind the wheel almost a full minute after parking the car, not really sure he wanted to know if that was because she’d gone to sleep despite her protests (and maybe still was asleep) or because he hadn’t thought to leave instructions that allowed for her to get up again.
He knew some submissives who needed that level of control. Up until now, though, Kitty had been pretty independent with her days. Deeply hoping he hadn’t left her to deal with bad ghosts alone, Noah went inside.
Everything was so quiet he had halfway convinced himself that she’d fallen asleep before he reached her door, but that was proven wrong the minute he glanced beyond her threshold. Kitty was sitting up in bed, fully dressed under the quilt and hugging her legs. Chin resting on her knees, only her eyes moved when she saw him.
“I didn’t mean for you to stay in bed all night,” Noah ventured. “You could have got up any time.”
She didn’t answer, but picked up something he hadn’t noticed lying on the quilt between her feet and held it up. The pregnancy test. She’d taken it.
He didn’t need to ask what the result was. The sag in her shoulders said it all.
“I hope you like roommates,” she muttered. “I figure in about six months, you’re going to have two of them.”
